My love and appreciation for Palm OS is somewhat obvious around these parts, culminating in the detailed Palm OS retrospective I wrote a little over a year ago. I consider Palm OS to be the shoulders on which all subsequent mobile operating systems are built, and I believe it would do the current technology press and users a world of good if they acquainted themselves with this prescient masterpiece.

That being said, with Palm OS being old and dead, the only way to experience it is to get your hands on a real device on eBay or its local equivalent in your country of residence. If you go down this route - which I strongly advise everyone to at least look into - try and go for the ultimate Palm device, the Palm T|X. It's the most advanced PDA Palm ever built, and you can pry mine from my cold, dead hands.

Sadly, not everyone has the disposable income, time, will, desire, or any combination thereof, to go out and buy real hardware just to play with a dead operating system and all the hardships that come with it. Since I still want to spread the word of Palm OS, I've been looking into an alternative - namely, the Palm OS Simulator.

The links are indeed pointers to the simulator, which is PalmOS precompiled for x86, with an emulator for the m68k stuff.

HOWEVER, there WAS a REAL emulator for PalmOS 5 devices.
It was mentioned on Palm's developer website.
It was only available to those subscribed to Palm's for-pay development program, so I never actually saw it.

It was code-named "Janeiro", and that's about the only thing I knew about this tool, although when I still cared, I really looked for this tool everywhere (never found it).

The main reason I wanted it was because it was the only way I could ever get Paragon's localization software for Palm working. It was machine-specific, and never worked on the simulator.